Thursday, January 21, 2016

Staunton, January 21 – Many Russians
now suffering from sharp declines in their standard of living or even unemployment
may direct their anger at migrants and representatives of non-Russian
nationalities, according to Aleksandr Brod, director of the Moscow Bureau for
Human Rights.

The recent beating of an ethnic
Kumyk from Daghestan on a regional train near Moscow by ten men armed with
baseball bats is an example of what could happen, Brod says, although he points
out that such attacks so far at least appear relatively rare according to
Russian government statistics (ria.ru/society/20160120/1362288110.html).

“Undoubtedly,” the human rights
activist says, “one must search for in this incident among other things an
ethnic component because the youths were looking for representatives and
attacked precisely them, according to witnesses.” One needs to ask, Brod
continues, why there were no guards on the trains given the threat of extremist
activity.

He says that he does “not exclude
the possibility” that this attack was in fact carried out by “some radical
youth group” or that it will be followed by others given the tendency of people
to want to identify some other group as being responsible for their own
problems.All too often, such objects of
attention and attack can be “migrants and representatives of national
minorities.”

Consequently, even though the
numbers of such attacks remain relatively small up to now, there is a very real
danger that “an outburst of radical nationalism and xenophobia has again become
possible.”

After Vladimir Putin seized Crimea
and invaded Ukraine, many Russians redirected their anger from migrants and minorities
toward Ukrainians. But now that Moscow is carrying out a new charm offensive about
Ukrainians, it is all too likely they will again focus on the traditional
objects of their anger -- especially as the economic
situation has become much worse.